Joshua Bowen, “Evangelicals and the Old Testament, Part 1: Rejoinder to Paul Copan on Violence in the Bible” (October 2023), bibleinterp.arizona.edu.
In the end, however, a much larger issue remains for Copan and those who make similar arguments. Let us, for the sake of argument, grant Copan all of his assertions. The biblical texts did not intend the reader to conclude that the Israelites killed EVERYONE. Therefore… what? Where would Copan go from here? Is it okay that the Israelites simply killed a LOT of people? Is it moral that they drove a large number of people from their homes as they displaced them from their cities? Is there no ethical issue that Saul and the Israelite army only killed a LOT of the Amalekites? It would seem that Copan must argue that the Israelites were justified in invading the land of Canaan, as they were acting on orders from their God. When it is pointed out that other ancient Near Eastern kings claimed to do the same (as I did clearly in my chapter), Copan must argue that these other kings were not justified, as their gods were not the one true God. This is the special pleading to which these arguments generally reduce.
Furthermore, Copan’s assertion that it was not genocide because the Israelites stopped short of killing everyone is fallacious. Genocide does not require every last person to be killed. Genocide can be defined as “the crime of intentionally destroying part or all of a national, ethnic, racial, or religious group, by killing people or by other methods.” The fact of the matter is, even if hyperbole was used in particular passages, this does not mean that the writer meant anything other than many people were killed. As John Collins told me, “You see, hyperbole… in order to have hyperbole, you have to have something to hyperbolize. You know what I mean? And as you know well in the case of the Assyrians, they were hyperbolic. Sure. Does that mean that they didn’t kill anybody? Hell no!”
The Amateur Exegete 
Yeah, logic-chopping/quibbling is a fallacious practice that comes naturally to all of us, and apologists are by no means immune. Whether certain passages of the OT are intended to reflect 100% or 75% or whatever% genocide is all a bit beside the main point: The martial commandments and conduct ascribed to the God of Abraham and his followers–especially in connection with the Conquest–are vicious, ruthless, unjust, and wildly misaligned with any notion of objective, timeless omnibenevolence. The rules of engagement Moses articulates in Deuteronomy 20, for example, are rife with actions now condemned as grave crimes against humanity: wars of aggression and subjugation, summary execution of prisoners of war, taking women and children as plunder like livestock, ethnic cleansing, etc. “Well, the Israelites didn’t actually do this all the time,” hardly makes this passage–and the times they *did* actually do this–more humane.
(On the bright side, the preponderance of the evidence is that the Conquest as traditionally understood didn’t happen, and that the emergence of early Israelite/Judahite communities was largely a less violent and more organic process of migration, settlement, and internal differentiation among Canaanites and other nearby Semitic peoples during the Bronze Age Collapse, but that’s a different discussion.)
–Lex Lata
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